A peek into the centuries-old estate in the town of Pego that independent Spanish watchmaker, Franc Vila, has called home for the past 15 years.

One of many illustrations created by Syd Mead for a promotional brochure distributed by US Steel in the late 1960s and early 70s.

US Steel would send the brochure for free to anyone who asked and nearly everyone in the art department at ILM, which produced the visual effects for Star Wars, had one. According to Joe Johnston, who was the visual effects art director on the film, this particular illustration served as the direct inspiration for the AT-AT vehicles in The Empire Strikes Back.

With JX Su and Patek Philippe’s Regional Customer Service Manager, Gerald Then.

A massive rendition of Casio's G-Shock Mudmaster, built out of Lego bricks, by Pedro Jimenez.

The hand-crafted, omega-shaped click spring on Yosuke Sekiguchi's prototype caliber YS-Y01 is a delightful touch.

As dreamt up by DALL·E 2.

An open-source, low-budget, desktop CNC mill that can output impressively tiny parts relative to its cost and components.

At 1.75 millimetres thick, fully cased, the latest from Mille is impressively durable given just how slim it is. Due in large part to its extensive use of titanium.

Necessarily doing away with a number of classical approaches to mechanical watchmaking in order to achieve this slimness, the novel caliber inside brings a handful of interesting touches to the table, most notably in the winding and setting works. While I'm not personally a fan of requiring a tool to wind or set the watch—particularly on a piece that's manually wound—the clutch to toggle between winding and setting appears particularly well engineered given the constraints at hand.

The dial being set in the same plane as the gear train is now commonplace in mechanical timepieces this thin, but Mille's approach lends the hands a comparatively improved level of resilience to any physical impacts the timepiece is likely to endure.

While I was somewhat concerned at first glance seeing them do away with the double roller and guard pin in the escapement, which are today standard shock-resistance safety features, upon further reflection it occurred to me that there are some workarounds Mille may have employed here that can neither be confirmed or denied in any of the promotional material I've seen and the 5000 Gs of impact resistance it was tested to speaks for itself.

One thing that is surprisingly notable in both the promotional photos and videos is the amount of dust and small fibers strewn about the movement, including a relatively large black fiber stuck to the top bridge of the going train right next the watchmaker's pointer finger in the above image. The voice-over talent in the linked video also gets some nomenclature wrong. At its 7-figure price point, one can only hope such oversights are not evident in the finished timepiece itself.

Its free-sprung, titanium balance wheel gets full thumbs up from me.

Gerd-Rüdiger Lang, the founder of Chronoswiss, returns with a new brand and a new timepiece, powered by the Marvin caliber 700.

From the sundial through to the perpetual calendar, Jaeger-LeCoultre's new, hands-on Stellar Odyssey workshop and tour of their manufacturing facilities looks to be an incredibly well-thought-out and engaging experience.

The movement side of George Daniels' hand-crafted Space Traveler pocket watch, with two separate gear trains to indicate both mean-solar and sidereal time.

Prior to being called The Space Traveller, this timepiece was charmingly referred to as the Daniels Squared. A nod to the assistance of Professor Daniels, at Cambridge University, in helping George Daniels reduce the known error in the calculations used for the gear train by nearly a factor of four.

The first mass-produced, American-made free-sprung balance, with an unusual design compared to its Swiss counterparts. First launched in 1958.